[Jake's] projects have become regular features here on Hack a Day. He keeps the Halloween hack-fest rolling with his Flying Crank Ghost. For the ghost he used a store-bought skull but sculpted some hands himself out of Styrofoam. The body is fashioned from coat hangers with a bit of creepy fabric draped over the hole thing to complete the look.

He added some very convincing motion to the ghoul using a salvaged microwave turntable motor. The motor is mounted in the center of a two crossed boards, and has an armature attached to it. Three strands of monofilament attach to the end of the armature, run through eyelets on the ends of the crossed boards, then attach to the head, and each arm. When the motor is turned on, the armature turns, moving the head and hands up and down at different rates. Take a look at the embedded video after the break to see the final product.

[Jake] does mention that the motor he used is a bit underpowered. We figure this only needs to hold up for one night, so dig through your junk bin and see if you can throw one of these together in a few hours.

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Spot welders are used in the fabrication of automobiles, PC cases, power supplies, microwave ovens, electrical junction boxes, Faraday cages, and various electronics. A spot welder is used because it produces a highly defined point of contact weld. The materials are welded without excessive heating, so working pieces are handled easily. The weld is also highly controlled and repeatable. In this how-to we cover the basics of a spot welder, and then show you how to build one from a microwave oven transformer.

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[Koil_1] knows he’s forgetful. In order to save himself from any undue harm, or possibly to keep from burning his house down, he felt he needed a timed power switch to run his soldering iron from. He realized he could harvest the relays and timer circuit from a microwave. This allows him to have presets for specific tasks. Considering the fact that you can get a used microwave for free or close to it most of the time, this was a great re use of something that might just go wasted otherwise. Great job [Koil_1].

Buzzsurf microwaved an RFID card so you don’t have to. Pointless, but real, unlike those piles of $20s.

[via Synaptic Seepage]

Today is the Fourth of July in the US, where we celebrate our freedom by blowing up a small portion of our country. Embedded above is [Jory] and [Jonathan] doing it wrong by microwaving their fireworks. We think a good formula for this year’s celebration is wireless fireworks control, gas powered blenders, and CHDK’s motion sensing to get the perfect firework photo… and if we get really bored we’ll probably shove some LEDs in a hotdog.

Every so often I learn a new microwave trick. [skuhl] sent in this …. myspace video. It appears that with a microwave, a jar and a candle to get things going, you can create you r very own plasma in a jar. You’ll probably kill your microwave doing this, but damn it looks cool.